The set piece of this hyperbolic ode to surfing is Laird Hamilton’s 2000 trip to Tahiti, where a monster wave provided the opportunity for what the movie portentously calls “the most significant ride in surfing history.” If you’re inclined to regard the sport as important and its practitioners as heroic, you’ll likely enjoy this beautifully photographed documentary, which presents Hamilton as a towering figure.

Certainly he’s responsible for much of the sport’s current popularity: A fierce competitor who seems genuinely driven, he’s a popular cover boy who’s landed modeling assignments and lucrative endorsement deals that include an American Express commercial.

Writer-director Stacy Peralta depicts Hamilton and his fellow surfers as not only dedicated but even obsessive, chasing the biggest waves with the single-minded determination of Captain Ahab pursuing Moby-Dick. Peralta’s images testify to the physical battering surfers undergo, and the onscreen participants pay tribute to brethren who lost their lives. (Barnes & Noble)

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Riding Giants is more than another blissful surfing movie. It’s an outstanding documentary about one era in American alternative lifestyles, when surfing was well-suited to a radical culture of social dropouts.

Using an amazing array of amateur film clips, shot for the most part in Hawaii and California from the late 1950s and early ’60s, director Stacy Peralta traces the rise of surfing’s appeal to young men looking to test themselves in an unorthodox (and sexy) milieu–of “living life to the fullest,” as former surfer-turned-screenwriter John Milius (Big Wednesday) puts it at one point.

Lengthy chapters on the glories of Oahu’s Makaha and the “superstition and dread” that accompanied the big-wave challenge of Waimea Bay are riveting and sometimes heroic, particularly told through the memories of surf legend Greg Noll. Great material, too, about the deadly wonders of surfing Mavericks, California, where the rocks will get one if the violent tides don’t. (Amazon)